Comment by vkou

US investment banks, which provide plenty of loans and mid-life funding for non-public companies are also deeply entangled in Washington. Facebook took In-Q-Tel funding. Google bought mulitple In-Q-Tel-funded startups.

That doesn't mean that the companies those banks fund are ran by idiots and sock puppets, it doesn't mean that Zuckerberg is a CIA-planted useful idiot[1], and it doesn't explain why Google is the most popular search engine in the US.

Just because you've taken government funding, doesn't mean the government does all the hard work of operating you. Just because you need to be in the good graces of the government to run your company doesn't mean some government bureaucrat is going to do all the hard work of building a trillion dollar business for you.

I must also note that I utterly fail to understand how the ideas you express can be reconciled with the success of all these firms, and also the HN zeitgeist of 'government bureaucrats are incapable of doing anything well.' They must truly have a better class of bureaucrat in China, given that they've somehow built a profitable trillion dollar business without anyone noticing. [2]

[1] It also doesn't mean that he's not doing useful work for the three letter agencies.

[2] Given how wildly successful these alleged bureaucrats seem to be, one can only image if the Soviet Union[3] got their hands on those folks. We'd all be driving Ladas, drinking vodka, and speaking Russian.

[3] Which is an actual example of a country where the government did run its businesses. For some reason, though, it didn't spawn any trillion-dollar e-commerce startups...